Columbus Day Blogging

T-Bone Burnett, (better known as the guy who taught the non-singing actors, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, to sing for the Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line), wrote a song in 1992 called "Humans From Earth," that suggests that to "rape and pillage" is a universal human trait:

We come from a blue planet light-years away
Where everything multiplies at an amazing rate
We're out here in the universe buying real estate
Hope we haven't gotten here too late

chorus:

We're humans from earth
We're humans from earth
You have nothing at all to fear
I think we're gonna like it here

We're looking for a planet with atmosphere
Where the air is fresh and the water clear
With lots of sun like you have here
Three or four hundred days a year

chorus

Bought Manhatten for a string of beads
Brought along some gadgets for you to see
Heres a crazy little thing we call TV
Do you have electricity?

chorus

I know we may seem pretty strange to you
But we got know-how and a golden rule
We're here to see manifest destiny through
Ain't nothing we can't get used to

We're humans from earth
We're humans from earth

[Note: I will only leave the song up only for a couple of days to respect T-Bone's intellectual property--we need to be discussing more thinkers named "T-Bone" in this class!]

There are a couple of clues in the song that Burnett includes the USA in this condemnation of imperialism, for example, in the reference to manifest destiny, the 19th century doctrine used to claim America's right to expand "from sea to shining sea." But the song also seems to conclude that all of "us" here on earth have this tendency (we will leave aside any questions of gender til the next chapter). This idea harshly critiques American and European imperialists specifically, and the human race in general, but it also suggests that oppressed peoples have themselves oppressed, or would oppress, given half a chance. (Let's spread that blame around!)

Interestingly, in your reading for Wednesday, Christopher Columbus is mentioned in a paragraph about, well, genocide (p. 59). The book does not blame Columbus personally for this (though one can read accounts of his tyrannical 7-year rule as governor of Jamaica), but connects his arrival in the already inhabited "new world" to the Europeans who came after him, and who practiced genocide, defined as "the deliberate, systematic killing of an entire people or nation." That is quite strongly put, isn't it? And we just celebrated Columbus day yesterday, in case you wondered why there was no mail or traffic jams.

So your assignment for your weekend's blogging is to reflect on the contradictions between these two symbolic Columbus's, the one that we were all taught about as kids, and whom we officially revere as a nation, and the oppressive Columbus of our textbook, symbolizing the history of violence perpetrated by white Europeans on the "hundreds of thousands of Native Americans [who] died during this period." What role does race play in understanding each of these opposed figures? Should the US even celebrate Columbus day? Is it good in some way to do so? Should we celebrate an "anti-Columbus day" as well? You need not, of course, take the book's position, but you should take it seriously. What values (for example, the values of liberalism and conservatism) do these symbolic Columbus's represent, and are these values shared, or do some groups emphasize one more than the other? Do the Columbuses represent what our book calls "positive" and "negative" ethnocentrism? Which one appeals to your value system, and why?

Please ponder a few of these questions in your post by midnight on Sunday (Oct. 15), and then comment around on other blogs before class on Monday.

Update: for a taste of what critics are talking about, here is an excerpt from an account of Columbus' actions by one member of his crew, Miguel Cuneo:

"When our caravels… where to leave for Spain, we gathered…one thousand six hundred male and female persons of those Indians, and these we embarked in our caravels on February 17, 1495…For those who remained, we let it be known (to the Spaniards who manned the island's fort) in the vicinity that anyone who wanted to take some of them could do so, to the amount desired, which was done."

Cuneo further notes that he himself took a beautiful teenage Carib girl as his personal slave, a gift from Columbus himself, but that when he attempted to have sex with her, she "resisted with all her strength." So, in his own words, he "thrashed her mercilessly and raped her."

Apparently, sex slavery was as common as that of labor:

As Columbus wrote to a friend in 1500: "A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are now in demand."

However, the Taino turned out not to be particularly good workers in the plantations that the Spaniards and later the French established on Hispaniola: they resented their lands and children being taken, and attempted to fight back against the invaders. Since the Taino where obviously standing in the way of Spain's progress, Columbus sought to impose discipline on them. For even a minor offense, an Indian's nose or ear was cut off, se he could go back to his village to impress the people with the brutality the Spanish were capable of. Columbus attacked them with dogs, skewered them with pikes, and shot them.

Eventually, life for the Taino became so unbearable that, as Pedro de Cordoba wrote to King Ferdinand in a 1517 letter, "As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth… Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery."